Indonesian Police Arrest Terrorist Leader With Al-Qaida Ties

Indonesian police have arrested the leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist network linked to al-Qaida, authorities said on Tuesday, on suspicion of recruiting members and sending them to Syria to train with extremist groups.

Counterterrorism police also arrested at least four other suspects linked to Para Wijayanto, who experts say was a student of Abu Bakar Bashir, the alleged mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people.

Wijayanto, who had been on the run since 2003 and had trained with terrorists in the southern Philippines, was arrested with his wife on Saturday on the outskirts of Jakarta, the capital.

Police said Wijayanto owned palm oil plantations on Sumatra and Borneo islands, which he used to pay some JI members up to 15 million rupiah ($1,061) a month.

“That money was also used to recruit and send people to Syria,” national police spokesman Dedi Prasetyo told Reuters.

Indonesia’s elite counterterrorism squad, Densus 88, was created in the wake of the 2002 Bali bombings to quash JI and similar groups in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

Security forces were seen as being successful in breaking up terror networks after key figures like Bashir were rounded up and jailed.

Bashir, who is considered a leader of JI, denied involvement in the Bali bombings. He was convicted in 2010 under antiterrorism laws for links to terror training camps in Aceh Province and jailed for 15 years.

Concerns have risen in recent years about a resurgence in homegrown terrorism and its financing.

“There are still many JI members, and after the fall of Osama bin Laden, they became sleeper cells,” said Stanislaus Riyanta, a terrorism analyst based in Jakarta.

“The fall of Islamic State may have left a gap for JI to rise again,” he added.

Indonesia scrambled to tighten its antiterrorism laws after a series of suicide bombings killed more than 30 people in the East Java city of Surabaya last year.

Hundreds of people have been detained under the new laws since the beginning of 2019.